Relations between a parent and their parents-in-law are not always peaceful. In the program Sans rendez-vous on Europe 1, psychoanalyst and sexologist Catherine Blanc answers the question of a listener who learned that she was going to have to spend a week on vacation with her in-laws. Her mother-in-law sometimes criticizes the way she and her husband raise their children.
Noémie's question
"My husband announced to me that we would spend a week of vacation this summer with his mother who has a house in the South. It worries me because she has such a hold on him. He says yes to everything. "she asks and she even allows herself to criticize my way of raising our children. What can I do to make everything go well?"
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Catherine Blanc's response
"We may be a husband and a dad, with our parents, especially on the territory of the parents, we very willingly become the child of our parent again. We get back into a situation where we forget our own authority, our own reading , her own creativity on the idea of how we raise a child or not. And a mother, insofar as she receives, also expects her child to become her child again. full of advice, which are sometimes orders ... Obviously, for the husband, it would be to question the education of his mother if he told him that he does not want to operate in this or that way. is a parent, it is to tell our parents that we intend to raise our children differently, without them hearing a judgment of their way of having educated us.
Shouldn't we let it go for a week?
I think that's what's going on, but for the stepdaughter it's not at all obvious. The son considers it pretty cool, that his mom takes care of everything and that she takes responsibility. Except that his wife feels challenged in her motherhood by another woman who was not his mother, infantilizes her husband and condones the fact that her husband is a little in the relaxation in his role. It becomes the bell-tower war between the wife and the mother-in-law, which obviously creates tensions in the couple, because there is a son happy to find the softness of the maternal lap and a woman who claims to be recognized by her husband as being legitimate. If we left our mother's house and went to love elsewhere, it is obviously because we were looking in another direction. But it's complicated to come back and say: 'I warn you mom, it's not like that anymore even if in your time it was like that.'
Who can make an effort?
From the moment you are received somewhere, it is the law of the place where you are received. These are the house rules. If we don't want it, we just don't go.
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Do we not dwell too much on rubbish that does not have a real impact on education?
In general, vacations are times out of the real, out of everyday life. So there is no question of saying, 'If you start giving him cakes, I won't be able to hold them afterwards.' Holidays must look like holidays, vacation dodos are vacation dodos, like the authorizations to leave the table or not.
What to do in case of conflict between mother and daughter-in-law?
The husband must tell his mother that it is his wife and that she also needs to be recognized in her reality, because she is not his daughter. That said, it is also possible to tell his wife that she does not have to be afraid of losing her role, since her role will definitely remain her role, even if the grandmother would be wonderful for the children. The mother remains the mother, so there is no fear to have. "